Children still being held in cages on the southern border

It appears that the appalling conditions under which migrant children were held during the Trump administration are still continuing under the Biden administration.

Hundreds of immigrant children and teenagers have been detained at a Border Patrol tent facility in packed conditions, with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough mats, according to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers.

The lawyers interviewed more than a dozen children Thursday in Donna, Texas, where the Border Patrol is holding more than 1,000 people. Some of the youths told the lawyers they had been at the facility for a week or longer, despite the agency’s three-day limit for detaining children. Many said they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are.
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John Oliver on how badly the US handles unemployment

Losing one’s job is not only a traumatic experience, it often leads to a cascade of disasters such as losing one’s home. Unemployment insurance is meant to tide people over until they find another job. But some political leaders, especially Republicans, seem to view it as a reward for lazy people. He describes how hard it is for people to get unemployment benefits and how some states like Florida cut the premiums that companies are supposed to put into the unemployment fund and then go out of their way to make things difficult for people to apply for relief.

50th anniversary of an epic break-in of an FBI office

On March 8th, 1971, antiwar protestors broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, PA and stole every file they could lay their hands on. These people were not criminal masterminds. They were ordinary people involved in peaceful antiwar movements, such as college professors, a homemaker, a taxi driver, and the like who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. The documents they stole and released revealed the existence of secret and illegal surveillance programs to infiltrate, harass, and discredit peaceful antiwar groups. The existence of these programs was widely suspected but unproven.
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Don’t mess with Katie

Congresswoman Katie Porter has shown time and time again that she prepares carefully for congressional hearings and yet industry executives keep trying to patronize and snow her and she keeps putting them in their place as happened again recently.

They never seem to learn that she does her homework.

We need more Chelsea Handlers and fewer Piers Morgans

Smarmy Piers Morgan has resigned as co-host from a British morning show after getting blasted for saying he did not believe what Meghan Markle said in her interview with Oprah Winfrey and storming off the set when another host criticized him for his remarks. His behavior did not surprise me. What does is that people keep giving Morgan jobs even though he has demonstrated over and over again that he is a grade A reactionary jerk.

After his latest exit, Chelsea Handler posted on Instagram a clip of her experience with Morgan when she was invited onto his show when he was on CNN as the replacement for Larry King.

I am sure that Morgan can get another job with some Murdoch outfit or Newsmax or something. That would be a natural home for a person such as he, smug, arrogant, and proud of his ignorance.

What happens when you elect a smug know-nothing

You know how it is when a small child is bored and they discover something that annoys people and repeatedly do it just to get attention? That seems to be what is happening with Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon). After being stripped of all her committee assignments for being an unreconstructed conspiracist, she has decided to use one of the procedural rules to slow down the work of Congress. Her choice of tactic is to put forward a motion to adjourn, something that has to be dealt with before business can continue and can take up to half an hour. She has started using it so often that even some of her Republican colleagues are getting fed up at the waste of time with nothing to gain, and more and more of them are voting against her motion. Her latest effort was opposed by forty Republicans, double the week before. Basically, Greene is generating bipartisanship!

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Court overturns conviction of Lula in Brazil, enabling him to run for president again

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known to all as Lula, is a socialist who was elected as president of Brazil as leader of the Workers Party and uplifted the conditions of its poorest people. He was one of the most popular leaders in the world. He was convicted of corruption in a very dubious proceeding in which the judge colluded with prosecutors but that conviction had the desired effect of preventing him from running for re-election as president. Lula was leading in the polls when he was removed from the race by this move, enabling the utterly reactionary Jair Bolsonaro to become president in 2019.

Back in November 2019, when Lula was released from prison pending appeals against his conviction, I posted about his case and linked to a Netflix documentary The Edge of Democracy (2019) that shows the whole process by which the right-wingers removed Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, imprisoned Lula, and captured power in Brazil.
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The relief bill heads to Biden to sign into law

A short while ago, the House of Representatives passed the $1.9 trillion relief bill known as the American Relief Plan. It now heads to the president who will sign it into law. The relief package is going to help many people.

We project that key elements of the American Rescue Plan would reduce that annual poverty rate to 8.7 percent. The policies would reduce poverty by more than half for children and for people in households experiencing job loss. Poverty would fall about 42 percent for Black, non-Hispanic people, 39 percent for Hispanic people, and 34 percent for white, non-Hispanic people, reducing the disparities in poverty rates for Black, non-Hispanic people and Hispanic people relative to white, non-Hispanic people.

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Money fight between Trump and the RNC

In an amusing development, Trump has sent cease-and-desist letters to the Republican National Committee (RNC), the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, telling them that they should stop using his likeness and name in their fundraising efforts because he wants all the money to go to his personal Save America PAC. He referred to these other groups as ‘RINOs’ (Republicans In Name Only).
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How Kyrsten Sinema went from progressive to Washington swamp dweller

How Kyrsten Sinema went from progressive to Washington swamp dweller

When Kyrsten Sinema was first elected from Arizona to the House of Representatives back in 2012 and later to the Senate in 2018, she broke through several barriers

Freshly elected to the Senate, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D) represents a slew of “firsts.” She will be Arizona’s first female senator. She was the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress and carries that first with her to the Senate. And the former Mormon was the first person sent to Congress to claim no religion. After winning her congressional seat in 2012, she was sworn in on the Constitution, forgoing the Bible chosen by Christians – the dominant religion for members of Congress, especially those from Arizona.

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